Instagram Schedule Posts

Can You Schedule Instagram Posts?

Instagram is only the 3rd social platform after Facebook and YouTube to have more than a billion monthly active users.

The popularity of the photo-sharing app in the past couple of years has grown to an extent where businesses can now no longer leave it out of their online marketing strategy.

As a matter of fact, Instagram suggests that there are now more than 25 million business pages on Instagram and 80% of their users follow at least one brand on their platform.

Being consistent on Instagram

As a business owner, you might already understand the importance of time and are thorough about things on which you actually should spend your time in order to grow your businesses.

When it comes to marketing yourself on social networking platforms, consistency is the key.

This means that you’ll have to regularly keep posting great content on Instagram to keep the users engaged, attract more followers, and improve your reputation on the platform.

But do you really think that you’d be able to take at least 30 minutes off from your busy schedule regularly to find great photos and captions to maintain your consistency on Instagram?

Even if you can, don’t you think this would negatively affect your productivity?

Also, a lot of businesses have a marketing team handling their Instagram page, but won’t this affect their productivity as well?

Especially, when marketing professionals already have so much on their plate? Fortunately, there is now a simpler and time-efficient alternative- Instagram post scheduler.

Instagram post scheduler

In January 2018, Instagram finally released a feature that social media managers have been wanting for a very long time- it now allows businesses pages on Instagram to schedule their posts.

The support has been added to the API of Instagram which means that the feature is not available on the Instagram platform itself.

However, social media software applications can access this feature and offer it to business pages through their application.

Popular social media software applications

While there are a number of social media software applications now available which help you manage your Instagram and other social pages in a more organized and efficient manner than managing them directly through the Instagram app and Instagram website, not every application supports the post scheduler API.

Using these applications is an effective way to get more Instagram likes, comments, followers, and improve your presence on the platform.

Most of these solutions come with innovative features to make Instagram page management easy and time-efficient.

Some of the most popular ones that do are as follows-

Buffer for Business

Later

Hootsuite

SocialFlow

Sprout Social

Postcron

Sendible

Know that most of these are paid applications which offer a host of additional features apart from scheduling Instagram photos.

Some of them also offer free packages but they come with limited features and mostly do not support post scheduling.

Also, some of them are also available in app form apart from their online platform.

Using the post scheduling feature

No matter if your aim is to get more Instagram followers, brand awareness, or get more leads, you need to turn your Instagram page into something that the users look up to it on a regular basis.

This can only be achieved by staying consistent with your Instagram posts.

Social media applications with post scheduling feature are an excellent way to post content consistently and keep your audience engaged.

While you can try any one of the applications mentioned above, it is important to understand how the post scheduling feature works.

While the feature works slightly different in most of these applications, knowing how it works in one would make it easier to understand its function in other applications too.

For this post, we are considering Buffer for Business to help you understand how you can use the post scheduling feature.

Once you have a business profile, follow these steps on Buffer for Business application-

Step 1. Connecting Instagram account

On the Buffer dashboard, look for the “Connect More” option. A new page will open with all the different social platform options. Select “Instagram” and enter the username and password of your Instagram page.

Step 2. Scheduling Instagram photos

Once the account is connected, its time for scheduling the post. Look for a photo that you’d like to post at a later date/time.

After selecting the photo, go to Buffer’s dashboard and look for the “Content” option, click on it and you’ll get the option to “Queue” your post.

Step 3. Queuing the post

Click the “Queue” button and you’d get to create a post just like you normally do on Instagram.

Add the photo, caption, and @-mentions if you want to.

Once done, click on the “Add to Queue” button and you can now share this post instantly or choose a date/time to schedule it for later.

That is it! If you’ve scheduled the post, it’ll be posted automatically at the time/date that you’ve selected.

All the other popular social media applications work more or less the same way.

Conclusion

From saving time, freedom to post content through a desktop computer, creating better Instagram captions, encouraging engagement, to cultivating a better feel and look of your page, there are several ways in which scheduled posts can help.

Now that you know what the post scheduling feature is and the top applications you can use for the same, use this knowledge to improve your credibility on the platform and attract more Instagram followers and engagement.